Dolby Vision 2: A big HDR boost for cheap TVs

When Dolby Labs announced Dolby Vision 2 in September 2025, I didn’t really get it.

The original Dolby Vision was easy to understand: If your TV and streaming content supported it, you’d get a brighter picture with more color detail, particularly in shadows and highlights. I remember being blown away by the technology when it first debuted at CES 2014, especially compared to the 4K displays and curved panels that TV makers were hyping up at the time.

The improvements Dolby Vision 2 promises aren’t as straightforward. While Dolby’s initial press release uses all kinds of jargon to describe the new format (with terms like “Content Intelligence” and “Authentic Motion”), the tangible benefits are tougher to parse.

Fortunately, CES 2026 provided an opportunity to see Dolby Vision 2 up close, compare it with the original Dolby Vision, and get some questions answered. While Dolby Vision 2’s benefits are a bit murkier, they at least address some annoyances with streaming video today.

HDR (high dynamic range) is a feature in many modern TVs that allows for greater differences between the darkest and brightest parts of an image, with more color detail in between. With HDR, for example, a scene depicting an explosion will exude more vivid reds and oranges, instead of blown-out whites, while HDR in a shadowy scene will be rendered with evocative blue and green hues, instead of just depicting a muddy gray.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. But with every HDR format—the original Dolby Vision along with HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma)—a common complaint is that dark scenes can look too dark. Dolby’s solution is to gather more data about how the content was made—for instance, the creator’s choice of reference monitor, or how much ambient light was in the color-grading room—and adjust brightness on playback accordingly. The idea is to compensate for the difference between what creators see in their expensive editing suites and what viewers see on their TVs at home.

“We know exactly what shadows were meant to be seen, and not,” said Dolby’s director of business strategy, Jonas Klittmark.

While the original Dolby Vision typically required a mid-range or better TV, Dolby is optimizing this new version for cheaper sets through a new tone-mapping engine. This combines additional metadata from creators with local tone mapping, which makes more granular adjustments to the colors of each pixel. Local tone mapping is the process of analyzing the wide range of color of brightness in an HDR image, and then compressing that data into a form that the TV you’re watching can actually deliver.

In a demo at CES, the result was a noticeable difference on what Dolby claimed was a $250 TV that didn’t have any local dimming zones. Next to a comparable set running the original Dolby Vision, the new version produced more vivid colors.

“The new engine is just much more capable of holding onto the goodness of the original HDR source, even on a display that’s quite limited in its capabilities, like this,” Klittmark said.

That same tone-mapping engine also gives Dolby Vision 2 a neat new trick: It’ll let users control the intensity of the HDR effect through a slider in their TV settings. Users might want to increase the effect in a window-lit room with lots of reflections, for instance, or dial it back if the picture seems too eye-searingly bright.

One of the most intriguing Dolby Vision 2 features has nothing to do with HDR at all. Instead, it’s a feature called “Authentic Motion,” which makes for a less jerky picture in scenes with fast motion (the industry refers to this visual jerkiness as “judder”).

Unlike the much-maligned motion smoothing effects on most smart TVs, which can be so smooth that it looks like you’re watching a soap opera, Dolby’s feature applies just a small amount of frame interpolation in certain scenes, based on metadata delivered by content providers. In a CES demo, Dolby showed a movie scene in which the camera swept across the room without the usual judder, but in a way that still felt cinematic.

“In Dolby Vision 2, we’re dynamically through metadata setting the de-judder just enough to take the edge off of the judder, so that it doesn’t bother you anymore,” Klittmark said.

Alongside the standard Dolby Vision 2, there will also be a fancier version called Dolby Vision 2 Max.

While both versions will have mostly the same features, Dolby Vision 2 Max will further adjust the picture based on a TV’s ambient light sensors; for example, it will help to avoid scenes that look overly dark. This is effectively an evolution of Dolby Vision IQ, an extension of Dolby Vision that is available in many of today’s mid-range to high-end TVs.

More importantly, Dolby believes Max will serve as an overall indicator of TV quality, in the same way it believes Dolby Vision once did.

When Dolby Vision first arrived in the mid-2010s, many TVs promised HDR compatibility, but weren’t bright or colorful enough to make HDR video look good. Dolby Vision support became a useful proxy for knowing if you’d get a decent HDR picture. Now that Dolby Vision 2 is heading to lower-end TVs, Dolby hopes the “Max” label will help delineate TVs with superior picture quality.

“Dolby Vision 2 Max is for premium TVs, and it will basically replace Dolby Vision in the market,” Chris Turkstra, Dolby’s vice president of home devices, said. “Dolby Vision 2, which you can think of as a standard version of Dolby Vision, that will attach to new TVs that don’t have Dolby Vision today.”

While it’s worth being aware of Dolby Vision 2 as more TV makers and streaming services get on board, it’s still early days for the format.

So far, only three TV makers have committed to supporting Dolby Vision 2: Hisense will offer it in its top-shelf RGB MiniLED TVs for 2026, TCL will have it in its high-end X11L SQD Mini LEDs and mainstream C series sets, and Panasonic will bring it to several new OLED TVs. In other words, the promise of Dolby Vision 2 in low-end TVs isn’t materializing anytime soon.

Meanwhile, three other major TV manufacturers–LG, Samsung, and Sony–have not announced their Dolby Vision 2 intentions. Samsung, for one, doesn’t support any version of Dolby Vision today–most likely because it doesn’t want to pay royalties to Dolby.

On the content side, Peacock is the only streaming service on board with Dolby Vision 2, which it will support along with the original Dolby Vision for live sports. Given that content makers must also support Dolby Vision 2 in the editing process, it might be a while before more streamers decide to throw their weight behind it.

Dolby Vision 2 probably won’t be a factor for anyone thinking of buying a new TV in 2026. But as the format becomes more common in the years to come, it’s something you’ll want to think about, especially if, like me, you finally understand it.

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